Mechanics of deformations and fracture final report

Thermal analysis of mechanical behavior of material models with temperature dependent propertie

Measuring the Success of Context-Aware Security Behaviour Surveys

Background: We reflect on a methodology for developing scenario-based security behaviour surveys that evolved through deployment in two large partner organisations (A & B). In each organisation, scenarios are grounded in workplace tensions between security and employees’ productive tasks. These tensions are drawn from prior interviews in the organisation, rather than using established but generic questionnaires. Survey responses allow clustering of participants according to predefined groups. Aim: We aim to establish the usefulness of framing survey questions around active security controls and problems experienced by employees, by assessing the validity of the clustering. We introduce measures for the appropriateness of the survey scenarios for each organisation and the quality of candidate answer options. We use these scores to articulate the methodological improvements between the two surveys. Method: We develop a methodology to verify the clustering of participants, where 516 (A) and 195 (B) free-text responses are coded by two annotators. Inter-annotator metrics are adopted to identify agreement. Further, we analyse 5196 (A) and 1824 (B) appropriateness and severity scores to measure the appropriateness and quality of the questions. Results: Participants rank questions in B as more appropriate than in A, although the variations in the severity of the answer options available to participants is higher in B than in A. We find that the scenarios presented in B are more recognisable to the participants, suggesting that the survey design has indeed improved. The annotators mostly agree strongly on their codings with Krippendorff’s α\textgreater0.7. A number of clusterings should be questioned, although α improves for reliable questionsby 0.15 from A to B. Conclusions: To be able to draw valid conclusions from survey responses, the train of analysis needs to be verifiable. Our approach allows us to further validate the clustering of responses by utilising free-text responses. Further, we establish the relevance and appropriateness of the scenarios for individual organisations. While much prior research draws on survey instruments from research before it, this is then often applied in a different context; in these cases adding metrics of appropriateness and severity to the survey design can ensure that results relate to the security experiences of employees

Quantum Metamorphosis of Conformal Transformation in D3-Brane Yang-Mills Theory

We show how the linear special conformal transformation in four-dimensional N=4 super Yang-Mills theory is metamorphosed into the nonlinear and field-dependent transformation for the collective coordinates of Dirichlet 3-branes, which agrees with the transformation law for the space-time coordinates in the anti-de Sitter (AdS) space-time. Our result provides a new and strong support for the conjectured relation between AdS supergravity and super conformal Yang-Mills theory (SYM). Furthermore, our work sheds elucidating light on the nature of the AdS/SYM correspondence.Comment: 8 pages, no figure

Who Watches the Watchers: A Multi-Task Benchmark for Anomaly Detection

A driver in the rise of IoT systems has been the relative ease with which it is possible to create specialized-but- adaptable deployments from cost-effective components. Such components tend to be relatively unreliable and resource poor, but are increasingly widely connected. As a result, IoT systems are subject both to component failures and to the attacks that are an inevitable consequence of wide-area connectivity. Anomaly detection systems are therefore a cornerstone of effective operation; however, in the literature, there is no established common basis for the evaluation of anomaly detection systems for these environments. No common set of benchmarks or metrics exists and authors typically provide results for just one scenario. This is profoundly unhelpful to designers of IoT systems, who need to make a choice about anomaly detection that takes into account both ease of deployment and likely detection performance in their context. To address this problem, we introduce Aftershoc k, a multi-task benchmark. We adapt and standardize an array of datasets from the public literature into anomaly detection-specific benchmarks. We then proceed to apply a diverse set of existing anomaly detection algorithms to our datasets, producing a set of performance baselines for future comparisons. Results are reported via a dedicated online platform located at https://aftershock. dev, allowing system designers to evaluate the general applicability and practical utility of various anomaly detection models. This approach of public evaluation against common criteria is inspired by the immensely useful community resources found in areas such as natural language processing, recommender systems, and reinforcement learning. We collect, adapt, and make available 10 anomaly detection tasks which we use to evaluate 6 state-of-the-art solutions as well as common baselines. We offer researchers a submission system to evaluate future solutions in a transparent manner and we are actively engaging with academic and industry partners to expand the set of available tasks. Moreover, we are exploring options to add hardware-in-the-loop. As a community contribution, we invite researchers to train their own models (or those reported by others) on the public development datasets available on the online platform, submitting them for independent evaluation and reporting results against others

Heterotic Cosmic Strings

We show that all three conditions for the cosmological relevance of heterotic cosmic strings, the right tension, stability and a production mechanism at the end of inflation, can be met in the strongly coupled M-theory regime. Whereas cosmic strings generated from weakly coupled heterotic strings have the well known problems posed by Witten in 1985, we show that strings arising from M5-branes wrapped around 4-cycles (divisors) of a Calabi-Yau in heterotic M-theory compactifications, solve these problems in an elegant fashion.Comment: 25 pages, v2: section and references adde

Recent advances and potential future applications of MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry for identification of helminths

Helminth infections caused by nematodes, trematodes, and cestodes are major neglected tropical diseases and of great medical and veterinary relevance. At present, diagnosis of helminthic diseases is mainly based on microscopic observation of different parasite stages, but microscopy is associated with limited diagnostic accuracy. Against this background, recent studies described matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometry as a potential, innovative tool for helminth identification and differentiation. MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry is based on the analysis of spectra profiles generated from protein extracts of a given pathogen. It requires an available spectra database containing reference spectra, also called main spectra profiles (MSPs), which are generated from well characterized specimens. At present, however, there are no commercially available databases for helminth identification using this approach. In this narrative review, we summarize recent developments and published studies between January 2019 and September 2022 that report on the use of MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry for helminths. Current challenges and future research needs are identified and briefly discussed

Electromechanical Reliability Testing of Three-Axial Silicon Force Sensors

This paper reports on the systematic electromechanical characterization of a new three-axial force sensor used in dimensional metrology of micro components. The siliconbased sensor system consists of piezoresistive mechanicalstress transducers integrated in thin membrane hinges supporting a suspended flexible cross structure. The mechanical behavior of the fragile micromechanical structure isanalyzed for both static and dynamic load cases. This work demonstrates that the silicon microstructure withstands static forces of 1.16N applied orthogonally to the front-side of the structure. A statistical Weibull analysis of the measured data shows that these values are significantly reduced if the normal force is applied to the back of the sensor. Improvements of the sensor system design for future development cycles are derived from the measurement results.Comment: Submitted on behalf of TIMA Editions (http://irevues.inist.fr/tima-editions

Quantum Gravity Corrections for Schwarzschild Black Holes

We consider the Matrix theory proposal describing eleven-dimensional Schwarzschild black holes. We argue that the Newtonian potential between two black holes receives a genuine long range quantum gravity correction, which is finite and can be computed from the supergravity point of view. The result agrees with Matrix theory up to a numerical factor which we have not computed.Comment: 14 pages, Tex, no figure